With a child of my own interested in running a marathon, I researched marathon training programs for youth in the US (there are some!), injury rates and how these compare to high school running programs.
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2026
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I'm sort of interested in this. The last time I looked at this issue I believe the consensus was that there is no pre-adolescent training effect, so just let kids run in an unstructured way for fun. When puberty hits, you get a training effect, but hard training should wait until the growth plate closes. I'd be interested if there were updated advice.
A little while ago I was working on a youth soccer certification. They talked a bit about the differences in warm-up/cool-downs related to different age groups. They didn't go too deep into but said roughly what you were describing. Pre-adolescent didn't really need much in the way of warm-up/cool-down and you could/should just "let 'em play". It wasn't until later that you didn't to be more on-task with that kind of thing to avoid injury.
Young people are strange beasts for sure. It's useful to get good habits ingrained I guess, but they don't really need warm ups. I'm not sure adults do either quite frankly. It seems just going easy for a while before you get into the hard stuff is good enough.
Stretching is another thing. I'm old enough that stretching advice has gone full circle twice since I've been around. From ballistic stretching good to bad, long slow static stretching bad to good to bad again, and stretch before to only after to before and after again. And there was the craze for oppositional engagement for a while where you tense the muscle opposite the target muscle, and the reciprocal inhibition would allow a deeper stretch of the target. I don't know what to do a out stretching. I just know I hate it and do less of it than I should.
My guess some of the lower injury rates with endurance training with youth is the emphasis is on volume and not intensity.
https://mark.stosberg.com/reflections-on-a-year-of-running-with-a-10-year-old-half-marathoner-2/?ref=lemmy
In my son's case, he been practicing longer runs for a year before he tried a marathon. The base training did seem give him going to a formal middle school training program later.
Now he's sophomore and has good success in the school running programs without major injuries.
Anecdote meet singular data point.
Meanwhile, lifetime injuries from overtraining too young and agonizing pain. So… maybe we both choose medical data instead of what happened to our immediate singular data points.
Which… drum roll… says what the original guy said.
The article references were sourced from a number of formal studies, I've collected some of them in another comment if you'd like to review or add to the list. https://lemmy.world/post/52372548/26040691
If you see my other comment the volume is actually where the risk lies. There is generally no problem with kids doing close to 100% VO^2^~max~ or HR for extended periods. They'll just get pooped and quit before they can do any damage. It's the repetitive stress of 10s of thousands of foot strikes that can put immature tissues at risk.
Notably bones aren't fully calcified and growth plates are open at the end of the long bones. There isn't really a good understanding of what stress and exercise induced inflammation do to developing tissues...at least that I'm aware of.
Edited for autocorrect. 😡